Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik

I don’t know what to say about this awesome book. Novik does a great job of developing three characters (Miryem, Wanda, and Irinushka). The setting of the story is great and we have a fire demon, a race of people called the Staryk who live in a wintery world that is adjacent to the Russia the story takes place in. I loved all three of these characters equally (which almost never happens). I wanted a follow-up story though about what happens to Miryem. The ending left me unsatisfied since I wanted to just keep reading more and more (a sign […]

Help Support Cannonball Read

Buy the following on Amazon and help our mission to stick it to cancer, one book at a time:

Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik

#CBR11 Bingo: Listicle (on a bunch of best of 2018 lists, including NPR, Bustle and Bookbub). Would also work for “Award Winner”, as it’s won a Locus Award, and ALA Award and an Audie, or “Remix”, as it’s a fairy tale retelling. Miryem is the daughter and granddaughter of Jewish moneylenders, but her father is a dreadful one, who doesn’t have the heart to actually claim back the debts that the villagers owe, even when his daughter is starving and the long, cold winters are making his wife sicker and sicker. Miryem refuses to see her mother die due to her father’s weakness, hardens her […]

Help Support Cannonball Read

Buy the following on Amazon and help our mission to stick it to cancer, one book at a time:

Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik

Bingo Review 6 (Remix) I am loving this Bingo thing; it’s forcing me to pick up things I’ve been wanting to read but have hesitated to start for various reasons. Spinning Silver is one of these books. I really loved Naomi Novik’s Uprooted fairy tale retelling, and Spinning Silver does a lot of the same things. The biggest change though is also my biggest complaint. Verdict: Spinning Silver is a distant silver to Uprooted‘s gold. Spinning Silver is a mix between a retelling of Rumpelstiltskin and general European fairy tale tropes. The story is set in quasi medieval Slovakia (I […]

Help Support Cannonball Read

Buy the following on Amazon and help our mission to stick it to cancer, one book at a time:

Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik

It’s my CBR11Bingo Cannonballer Says Square, thanks to: narfna, velveeter, Aquillia, Jenny S, alwaysanswerb! Before I was a CBR participant I was a CBR lurker. I am always looking for something new to read and this book- and author- got such strong reviews that I’ve had it on my ‘ok I’m finally going to get to this’ reading list for months. Miryem is the daughter of a money-lender in a small town. Her father is too soft-hearted to be any good at his chosen profession, which leaves his family cold and hungry in the winter and his wife getting progressively […]

Help Support Cannonball Read

Buy the following on Amazon and help our mission to stick it to cancer, one book at a time:

Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik

Trying to summarize this is hard, because there are a lot of different storylines and viewpoints. We have Miryem, the daughter of a not-very-good moneylender. Oh, he’s a good man, too good to be a moneylender in fact, in that he’s not the best at collecting his money back. Miryem eventually decides to take up the slack and collect the debts herself. Responsibility takes a toll on people, especially when you have to take that burden from someone else. She idly makes a comment that she can turn to silver to gold, and that comment is heard by the wrong […]

Help Support Cannonball Read

Buy the following on Amazon and help our mission to stick it to cancer, one book at a time:

Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik

I was so excited to get Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik as part of the book exchange because I loved Uprooted and had read and enjoyed the first book in Novik’s Temeraire series this summer. This is a loose (very loose) retelling of Rumpelstiltskin set in a past both realistic and imaginary and involving three young women. Miryem is the daughter and granddaughter of moneylenders, and she takes over her father’s business when his inability to demand payment leaves her family almost destitute and her mother falls ill. She turns out to be quite good at this job. Wanda is […]

Help Support Cannonball Read

Buy the following on Amazon and help our mission to stick it to cancer, one book at a time:

Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik

Before this week, if you had told me that one of my favourite fantasy books I’ve ever read would be a retelling of Rumpelstiltskin of all things, I would have laughed in your face. But that is one way to describe Naomi Novik’s Spinning Silver, her follow-up to Uprooted (which was far and away one of my favourite books from a few years ago). Tonally, Spinning Silver is similar to Uprooted. Both feature a non-traditional European fantasy world, in that the Polish grounding for Uprooted and the Slavic folklore for Spinning Silver aren’t as common as Vikings or Regency or knights in armor. Both feature the kind of […]

Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik

I read most of this book in a day. It was so charming and lovely. In the vein of Uprooted, Spinning Silver is another loosely inspired retelling of a fairytale, this time Rumplestiltskin. I’m honestly not sure which book I liked better. It’s been a while since I read Uprooted, and this book is one of those that gets better in your head the longer you sit with it after you finish. Our Rumplestiltskin is actually one of our heroines, Miryem, the daughter of a moneylender (a historically Jewish profession, as usury was against Christian beliefs, though that didn’t stop them from borrowing […]

Share the post "Naomi Novik is two for two in my book (I still need to read Temeraire!!)"